Many supporters of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, trade agreement are arguing that its fate rests on President Obama's bilateral talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Japan this week. If Japan and the United States can sort out market access issues for agriculture and automobiles, the wisdom goes, this huge deal - in effect, a North American Free Trade Agreement on steroids - can at last be concluded. But this view obscures the many seemingly intractable problems TPP negotiators are grappling with.

I'm glad Sergio Munoz opened public discussion of extending NAFTA to Central America in his Feb. 7 commentary. Isn't it time we began to consider opening the U.S.-Mexican border to the movement of people? DON BRAY Claremont

As President Obama travels to Mexico on Wednesday to meet with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the one-day summit is expected to focus partly on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious 12-nation trade pact being negotiated between North American and Asian countries. Here is a primer on the talks: Q: What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership? A: The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is a free-trade pact being negotiated among 12 Pacific Rim countries.

Concerning Ross Perot's negative opinion of NAFTA ("Can Workers Kill NAFTA? You Bet!" Commentary, Aug. 26): American companies have been going to other countries for many years, wherever they can find workers willing to work for less pay. They did not need the North American Free Trade Agreement to go to other countries. Ross Perot knows that, and he knows they will continue to leave if NAFTA is not passed. A report I remember from about a year ago is that the Japanese do not like NAFTA.

I agree with everything Pat Buchanan said about NAFTA and American manufacturing jobs going to Mexico (Column Right, June 28). However, he didn't give the obvious and logical answer to the problem. Corporations are private tyrannies with top-down decision-making. Both American workers and Mexican workers should own and democratically operate their factories. No workers would vote to send their jobs to a cheap labor market in another country. Of course, if Buchanan accepted this idea, that would make him a socialist, and I'm sure he wouldn't like that!

I am writing in response to the Column Left (Sept. 9) by Bob Kuttner on NAFTA, which paints the trade agreement as ill-advised policy and bad politics. President Clinton supports NAFTA because he believes it will produce jobs and enhance our competitiveness in the global economy. That is the bottom line: As is now recognized by all but the pact's most subjective foes, this agreement will create more jobs here in the United States than will be lost due to competition. (In the first two years alone, it will create 200,000 jobs, significantly more than it loses.

Your endorsement (" 'Fast Track' Is Right Track for U.S. Trade Interest," editorial, Sept. 10) of President Clinton's request for congressional "fast track" authority to negotiate future trade agreements is at best disturbing. The last time Congress abrogated its responsibilities in trade negotiations the U.S. was stuck with NAFTA. NAFTA, the American public was told, was going to create jobs in the United States, slow the flow of illegal immigration from Mexico, stem the tide of drugs crashing into our country and improve environmental conditions along the border.

U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor's tough stand on environment and labor reforms (editorial, March 11) for the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement is understandable. It will be a gross mistake to overlook Mexico's sordid conditions in maquiladoras, its serious public health problems in border communities and the myriad American firms moving south to escape U.S. workplace regulations. Mexico must take note that NAFTA will open a large section of its economy to investment from the United States and Canada.

The rebels in Chiapas followed their own timetable (Jan. 4). Such a large-scale operation obviously required long-range planning. The fact that it coincided with the implementation of NAFTA may or may not have been deliberate. But the relationship to NAFTA is evident. NAFTA is one of several recent actions by the Mexican government which favor wealthy investors over Mexico's people. Another such action was the abolishment of the ejido system of land tenure, which had previously protected small farmers.

MEXICO CITY - Twenty years after their countries signed a landmark regional trade agreement, the presidents of the United States, Mexico and Canada will meet this week to attempt to strengthen the economic ties envisioned in that pact, correct the omissions and find ways to expand. Trade and commerce are expected to dominate the agenda when President Obama meets with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts - President Enrique Peña Nieto and Prime Minister Stephen Harper - in the Mexican city of Toluca, just west of Mexico City, on Wednesday.

Worn wood floors groan under the weight of customers as Milo Rendon serves up another frozen treat. A steady stream of Nogalians seeking refuge from the scorching Sonoran desert sun duck into the old, dusty building that houses Finitos, the Rendon family business. As Rendon prepares a lemon-flavored shaved ice, he asks, "Do you want a saladito ?" A customer accepts the offer and a dried, salted plum is tucked into her snack and topped with another scoop. Finitos served as a house before it was converted into a business, and a faint air of neglect mixes with a whiff of success at the 21-year-old bustling hole in the wall less than two miles from the Mexican border.

Nearly 20 years after President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, a key provision that grants Mexican trucks access to U.S. highways remains stalled. Staunch opposition from unions and consumer groups in this country, which argue that unsafe foreign trucks and inexperienced drivers put U.S. jobs and lives at risk, have successfully shut down even the most modest attempts to comply with NAFTA. In October, the Obama administration tried again, with a pilot program granting three Mexican trucking firms limited access to U.S. roads.

Washington focuses on the urgent and has little time for the important. As a result, it faces chronic problems and cannot plan for the future. There is no better illustration of this than the idea that was missing from President Obama's address last week to Congress on jobs: North America. Had he grasped it, he would have amplified some of his proposals in a way that would have helped achieve his job goals and two others — doubling exports and limiting undocumented immigration.

Mexico said Monday it would increase tariffs on about 90 U.S. products in retaliation for last week's decision to end a pilot program that allowed some Mexican trucks to transport goods in the United States. Economy Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Mateos said the U.S. decision violated a provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement that was supposed to have opened cross-border trucking by January 2000. "We consider this U.S.

Congress has hit the brakes on a Bush administration program to give Mexican trucks wider access to U.S. roads, putting President Obama in the middle of a politically sensitive trade dispute. A $410-billion spending bill that passed the Senate on a voice vote Tuesday would end funding for the cross-border trucking program, one of the most contentious issues to arise out of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. The House approved the spending measure last month.

I am opposed to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Even proponents of the treaty such as the noted Nobel Prize winner for Economics Milton Friedman admit that the benefits from NAFTA will be minimal. They concede that it is not really a free trade agreement; it is a managed trade agreement. On the negative side, the Valley will lose thousands of jobs in the short term. Given the current state of our economy, we cannot afford massive short-term economic pain for nebulous long-term gain.

I never thought I'd find myself on the same side as Pat Buchanan (Column Right, Nov. 2), but here I am, agreeing about NAFTA. Hispanics in particular have fallen into the "economics uber alles " trap. By espousing sharing the bottom of the barrel as the only solution, they have abdicated all power to the corporations. Bluntly, if our government would stop supporting every union-busting dictatorship in Central and South America, we wouldn't have to worry about low wages.

Ending a three-day trip to Colombia and Mexico, John McCain praised Mexican drug-fighting efforts Thursday and hailed a U.S. aid package for security forces here as a key step in bilateral relations. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, said the so-called Merida Initiative approved by Congress last week was an "important sign of progress and cooperation to fight the drug cartels and the flow of drugs into the United States."

President Bush and the leaders of Mexico and Canada delivered a forceful message Tuesday to the next president of the United States: Don't mess with NAFTA. Their warnings against tinkering with the North American Free Trade Agreement brought them into the presidential race on the day Pennsylvanians voted in a Democratic primary contest that focused on how free trade has cost their state many factory jobs.